head to head · open source
Lightpanda vs patchright
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars, 2,024 forks, 98 open issues and last shipped yesterday. patchright has 5,072 stars, 245 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Lightpanda leads on adoption by 712% (41,174 vs 5,072 stars). Lightpanda is written in Zig under AGPL-3.0; patchright is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Lightpanda has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, patchright 5%. Lightpanda was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (browser, playwright), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Lightpanda | patchright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Zig | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.0K | ⑂ 245 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lightpanda if
- You weight community size — 41K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Zig
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick patchright if
- You want the patchright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and patchright fits your workflow better
About Lightpanda
Lightpanda Browser The headless browser built from scratch for AI agents and automation. Not a Chromium fork. Not a WebKit patch. A new browser, written in Zig.   Benchmarks Requesting 933 real web pages over the network on a AWS EC2 m5.large instance. See benchmark details. Quick start Install Package Managers Latest nightly from Homebrew: Latest nightly from Arch Linux User Repository: Download from the nightly builds You can download the last binary from the nightly builds for Linux and MacOS for both x86 64 and aarch64. For Linux Verify the binary before running anything: Linux aarch64 is also available…
read the full Lightpanda overview →
About patchright
🎭 Patchright Patchright is a patched and undetected version of the Playwright Testing and Automation Framework. It can be used as a drop in replacement for Playwright. [!NOTE] This repository serves the Patchright Driver. To use Patchright, check out the Python Package, the NodeJS Package or the community driven .Net Package [!IMPORTANT] Patchright only patches CHROMIUM based browsers. Firefox and Webkit are not supported. Sponsors Want to Sponsor this Project? Contact @vinyzu on Discord! NodeMaven: Your efficient proxy provider for Web Scraping and Automation with High Quality IPs. Why NodeMaven? 🎯 ZIP…
read the full patchright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lightpanda or patchright more popular?
Lightpanda has 41,174 GitHub stars and patchright has 5,072. Lightpanda has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lightpanda and patchright free?
Both are open source. Lightpanda is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and patchright under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lightpanda and patchright?
Lightpanda is written in Zig and patchright in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Lightpanda or patchright?
Choose Lightpanda if you want the larger community (41,174 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose patchright if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.